Anyone here making money with online courses?

[mce]

If you make money with your own online course subscription programs, which email platform do you use for content marketing autoresponder emails?

Aweber good?

Anybody that's cheap but good?

[J. Falcon]

Bump for you...

[Publisher Bucks]

For our frontends of our older sites, we're using a mixture of hard coding and SSI updates to rotate certain areas, just to keep a fresh look, the added benefit of this is that we get to see the metrics of what appears to make people join the courses, without the need to offer a 'free' option on the joins.

For the backends we use SimpleCMS by PHPJabbers for some of our older membership courses, it does what it needs to as far as managing the content although we took an 'all at once' approach, much like adult site memberships did mid-90s.

A few of the areas in the membership sites are controlled by phpdate and SSI to rotate sections out every few weeks, to at least give the 'impression' of regular course updates every 1-3 months depending on the specific type of course. That being said, 100% of the content inside is text based which makes it an 'easier' sell to members as they understand that 'writing' takes time.

The phpdate and SSI option for 'updates' gives us the ability to focus on getting new properties in development plus, being able to focus on truly custom and exclusive content, which takes time on a course, unlike adult you just cant throw a bunch of images or videos up and call it an 'update' the content truly does need to be exclusive and high quality for paying customers to retain and rebill.

For the affiliate side of things we've been using this on our old sites:

codecanyon.net/item/affiliate-pro-affiliate-management-system/12908496

Its 'clunky' but a cost effective option for mainstream sites.

On our newer sites, we're using a mix of custom code and off-the-shelf based on Affiliate Pro.

For the payment side of things we're using Paypal buttons with the recurring option setup for our older web properties and again, it does what it needs to, its not fancy by any means but, it works, especially when utilizing a 'set it and forget it' business model on the lower quality courses where non-adult affiliates are literally throwing any traffic they have at anything they can to garner a sale... Much like throwing shit at a wall and hoping some sticks, I've never understood why non-adult publishers do this but that's not my issue [shrug]

We're going with CCBill for our new sites.

Affiliate tools wise, we're going entirely custom so we can control what our publishers get and when, instead of just giving them a free-for-all approach to grabbing everything at once and flooding the marketplace with promo materials and tools.

For the mailing side, which was your original question, we use Neuvomailer and it is, without a doubt the most feature packed piece of mailing software we're ever used. We get to control EVERYTHING with our subscribers. The added benefit is that it is self-hosted so we also have full control over the data, which is where the $ is.

Hope this is of some use to you

[ilnjscb]

Yes, but I use one of the 2nd tier sites to distribute our courses, and it sucks. Payment in 30 days, very poor content protection, bad service, and costs 100$/m plus a small cut. If I could do my own I would. I will eventually. I should probably talk to ^^^

[fuzebox]

There are tons of purpose built autoresponder platforms for doing this, almost anything is better than aweber.

Been a while since I looked at this stuff but Clickfunnels is popular and can do everything you need to run a course. Also off the top of my head Leadpages, Getresponse, Drip, Active Campaign, Wishpond, Keap, Convertkit...

[mce]

Originally Posted by fuzebox

There are tons of purpose built autoresponder platforms for doing this, almost anything is better than aweber.

Is their inbox rate comparable to Aweber though?